Quiet Quitting and Lying Flat. Looking at the trend with a long generational lens.

From The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The other day I got an email from some news source about "quiet quitting".  I only read the headline and the first paragraph, so I didn't inform myself on whatever it was about in any depth.

Then this headline hit the news sources:

Conan O'Brien's assistant who's 'quiet quit' her job for over a decade says it's okay to be 'mediocre' and find ways to do the 'minimal amount of work possible'

Now there's a blizzard of such stories, so many in fact that I saw a story about how many there are.  Another story, on NPR, put it this way:

Over the last several weeks, the concept of "quiet quitting" has exploded like a supernova across the media universe.

And they don't all apply to just the US.  Here's one about our supposed arch economic nemesis, the People's Republic of China:

Before ‘quiet quitting’ in the U.S., there was ‘lying flat’ in China. How the anti-work movement swept the world’s two largest economies

Apparently "quiet quitting" means two things.

To some people, it apparently means just doing as little as possible and not getting too invested in your job.

Conan O'Brien's longtime assistant just wrote a book on the topic, and claimed this status for herself, which is interesting.  In some ways, the book sort of recalls the 1967 film How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.¹

The other meaning is close, but not quite the same.  It means to do the amount you are paid for, and nothing else.  I.e. your own time, is your own time.  Again, the NPR article put it this way:

"You're still performing your duties, but you're no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it's not — and your worth as a person is not defined by your labor."

Indeed, both of these trends have the latter as their common theme.

So what is going on here?

I probably ought to put my usual peremptory rejection of the Stauss-Howe Generational Theory in here, as once again I'm citing to it, but there's something generational going on here, I'm pretty sure.  Interestingly, it really shows where the theory is lacking, vindicating, I suppose, my skepticism about it.  This trend is generational, but it doesn't fit into the "this generation, then that" categorization the Stauss Howe theorist back.  About the only thing that rings true on this development is that changes tend to follow a crisis.

Crisis you say?

Well, I could hand you a veritable cornucopia of crises.  COVID-19 provided a huge one, and perhaps just now we're really getting to learn what its long term societal impacts are. As one Lying Flat Chinese individual noted:

But when the pandemic hit, life as he knew it came to an abrupt stop. Like many other workers Covid made him reassess his priorities in life.

Chatting with artist friends back in his home town it struck him how although they had little money they always had something interesting to say about their day and what they were up to - while all he had was work.

From the BBC. 

Anyhow, what that would mean that they should have these sets of characteristics.

What I've observed before here is this regarding the generations that follow the Boomer, and the Boomers themselves.  The Boomers were the most fortunate generation, as a generation (individual stories can and often do run counter to a generation's story).  They were born into a post-war world in which wealth was abundant like never before. Their parents sent large numbers of them to college at a time when you could still get a good job with just a high school diploma.  The US was the dominant economic power.² 

Like spoiled children often do, in their late teen early adult stages, they rebelled against their parents, and did so spectacularly.  But also, like privileged children, they came back into the fold pretty quickly as a rule.

Again, huge disclaimer, this might apply to you if you were listening to Richie Havens at Woodstock, but very well might not if you were listening for the VC in Vietnam.  Individual circumstances vary.³

As a generation, however, the same generation that didn't want to trust anyone over 30, hit their 30s, and went into careers of all sorts.  Pretty soon, the same generation that was lampooning their parent's generation for being interested in "plastics" was looking for all sorts of new uses for it.

As a huge generational cohort, and one that stepped over their parent's heads economically pretty quickly, they've been enormously reluctant to let go of the reins.⁴   The ultimately irony is the same generation that criticized their parents, a damaged generation that had grown up on the Second World War and the Great Depression, they ultimately espoused much of the same ideals in the workplace, even though they damaged much of their parent's generation's ideals in other areas (more on that in a separate post coming up).

So, what occurred, it seems to me, is that the generations that followed the Boomers more closely resembled some prior generations rather than have bold new features.  Generations Jones, growing up in the boomers wake but also enduring the tail end of a crisis, the 1970s inflation, came to have much the same view that the Depression Era or World War Two era generation did about work, although they differed on many other thins. Better find some and keep it.  They simply endured the Boomers as they had little choice, knowing that they were going to be seated at the children's table forever, must like teenagers in their mid-teens who find themselves seated with ten-year-olds at the Thanksgiving Table. No, you can't choose your own cut of turkey.  No, you can't have a glass of wine.  Yes, you are getting gravy whether you like it or not.

The Millennial's, and the generation behind them, seem to me to be a lot like the generation that fought World War One, that being the supposed Lost Generation.  No matter how they are defined by demographers and social scientists, those generations, when looked at, generally came into their own young, as prior generations had, and had little concept of employer loyalty.  Indeed, the same generation in the teens and twenties was often strongly pro labor and strongly anti "fat cat".  

I've noted these two instances before, but regarding this generation, back with the Pritzker Military Library still had its excellent podcast, it had a very good podcast regarding that generation. An author had interviewed a large number of very elderly American Great War veterans, and their interviews had some striking similarities.  One veteran recalled how he'd graduated from high school, taken a job at a local insurance brokerage right after that, fought in the war, came home, went back to work for it, married and lived out his entire life right there, ultimately owning the brokerage.  Collectively the men interviewed, many of whom were from farm families, had the view that life was hard, sudden death was common, the war came, it was hard, and sudden death was common, got out of the service, and life was hard, with sudden death being common.

World War One was one more thing.

So how does this relate to quiet quitting and laying flat?

More than you might suppose, I'd submit.

Generation Jones silently concluded, almost from the moment that they turned 18, that life was hard, and they were going to have to work in the shadow of the Boomers, with the Boomer set to use up as much of everything absentmindedly and remaking the world in the plastic image of the time, as The Graduate lampooned.  Their opinions didn't matter, and never would.  They pretty much resigned themselves to dying at their desks, and now that they're nearly 60, they're still resigned to it, with that resignation reinforced by their fellows, set to die at their desks, and often by their spouses, who grew up in the same era and are afraid of any thought that a person would do anything other than keep on keeping on, until the last row is plowed, and the tired mule dies in harness.

And to make it all the better, the Great Inflation, the horror of the economic times when they entered the workforce, has returned, robbing them at the begging of their entry into the work force, and cheating them at the period that should be the end.

Millennials, X and Y are different, however.  And maybe in this way, they're looking back.

Romanticizing the past is really dangerous.  Past times were typically much less ideal than we'd like to imagine.  But things in fact can be lost.

Much of what we see today in general family trends is merely a return to the past.  Adult children who are not married living at home is a return to the past.  Even married children living in a parent's home is a return to the past.  Not really feeling like moving all over the country, and focusing on work to support your life, rather than it being your life, well. . . that is in some ways too.

Footnotes

1. I'm not going to read it, in part because Conan O'Brien isn't funny. Also, however, writing a book is a pretty ambitious endeavor and I somewhat doubt that the author had quietly quit, but who knows.

2.  This isn't intended to be a bash on the Baby Boomers post, and indeed, most of the post on this site that seem to, aren't meant to be.  What this post documents is trends.

There are no perfect generations, I'd note, including the "Greatest Generation" that has come to be untouchable.  If this were a much longer post, it'd go into that in some detail as well, as much of what we're seeing right now stems from their experiences, with lives shattered from the Great Depression and World War Two, and being unable to really put them back together thereafter.

Right here, however, is a good place to note this.  The parents of the Boomers were different to start with, as they had been through a crisis that dated back to 1929 and their lives had no chance of being normal until 1945. The impact on the personality of the generation was inevitable.

3. See 2.  This can't be emphasized enough.

When I was a National Guardsmen in the 1980s my unit was full of Vietnam Veterans who hadn't gone to college and who had instead gone to war.  Their histories didn't match that of the generational archetype in a lot of ways.

4.  A bizarre example of this was given to the country the other day when the Biden White House had James Taylor perform at the signing of a bill.  Taylor performed Fire and Rain.

Seriously?

Fire and Rain was released in 1970.  

In terms of years passed, this would be equivalent to having had Al Jolson sing That Haunting Melody at the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was the top hit of 1912.  For that matter, Taylor's era was closer to Glen Miller's than to the current one.  There's no way having Taylor signing at a White House event makes it relevant to most current Americans given that most were born after 1970s.

Besides, Taylor is overrated and boring.